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At no time soon will the U.S. be following Canada’s example of scrapping the penny. That process started Monday, as the Royal Canadian Mint ceased distribution of the nuisance coin to banks and other financial institutions.

The benefits for Americans in following suit are self-evident.

In 2011, the U.S. Mint was spending 2.4 cents to make a penny, which slipped back to the recent norm of 2 cents last year. The loss to the U.S. Mint — to Americans, that is — comes to $58 million a year. For Canada, those figures were 1.6 cents and $11 million.

A century ago, the penny had close to 25 times the buying power it does today. A mere 19 per cent of Canadians still pay cash in retail and hospitality transactions, estimates show. And that 19 per cent, Star reporter Jessica McDiarmid noted Friday, imposes an estimated cost on business of about $150 million a year in handling pennies alone.

Taking note of Monday’s penny phase-out in the Great White North, Time magazine describes it as a “Canadian experiment.”

Oy.

Canadian acceptance of the penny’s demise has been overwhelmingly positive. The declining utility of the one-cent piece makes the phase-out long overdue. Indeed, it trails Australia’s “experiment” in scrapping its penny by 23 years.

“At some point, you need to look at this like a business,” Oklahoma City businesswoman Terry Neese told the Associated Press last month. Neese turned down a 2005 offer to head the U.S. Mint. “When it costs twice as much to produce an item than what you are selling it for, you can’t sell it for very long.”

Indeed, U.S. Congressional auditors recently went further, counselling the elimination of dollar bills. The savings for Americans in replacing the fragile paper bill with a $1 coin would be, they estimate, about $4.4 billion over three decades.

But, as Neese points out, America’s experiments with dollar coins “have never been effective in the system because they look too much like the quarter.”

Well, double oy. Why not, um, make a U.S. dollar coin that looks different than a quarter? A coin with a larger circumference than the quarter and that has a unique design. Like the loonie, say, whose embrace by Canadians was so enthusiastic that the toonie soon followed?

This is where common sense goes out the window and the lobbyists step in, as you likely guessed.

There’s a Tennessee outfit, Jarden Zinc Products, employing all of 200 people, that is exclusive supplier to the U.S. Mint of the coin blanks from which U.S. pennies are made. Jarden backs a lobby group with the typically misleading name “Americans for Common Sense.” It argues, among other things, that phasing out coins would impose a “rounding tax” on consumers made to pay $1 for items previously priced at 99 cents.

The “rounding tax,” like the Loch Ness monster, is much discussed, but no evidence of its existence has been detected in the many countries from Britain to Israel that have scrapped their lowest-denomination coins.

Yet for now the tail wagging the elephant is Jarden and U.S. vending machine and laundromat operators that object to having to retrofit their machines.

The U.S. doctrine of “American exceptionalism,” dating back to the beginning of the Republic, is less often a virtue than a stubborn resistance to progress.

It means being one of the few remaining holdouts against metric and peacekeeping; the lone affluent country without universal single-payer healthcare; alone in the West in clinging to the barbaric practice of capital punishment; the contradiction of being pro-gun and anti-abortion; of pledging allegiance to the pursuit of happiness yet denying same-sex marriage; and conducting federal elections differently in each of Iowa’s 99 counties.

That’s a shame, since phasing out the U.S. penny would unleash a short-term surge in charitable receipts. Think of Franklin Roosevelt’s “March of Dimes” to finance the fight against polio. Or the penny drive among New York youngsters that finally made possible, after a 10-year delay, the mounting of the Statue of Liberty on a locally financed pedestal as tall as the statue itself. Otherwise, “Liberty Enlightening the World” would still be in crates in Queens.

In the meantime, Craig Kielburger’s “Free the Children” penny drive to launch clean-water projects in the developing world already has collected 70 million pennies, exceeding the weight of 32 elephants.

That money will save lives among the estimated 2 million infants and toddlers who die each year from diarrhea for scarcity of pure fresh water. As Free the Children evolves into a nickel drive, even more lives will be saved.

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